CHEE 360 - Technical Communications

How to Select a Patent Database

Selecting the appropriate patent database largely depends on the type of information you need. If you need to find a copy of a known patent, there are many places on the web where you can download PDFs. However, if you need to do a state-of-the-art or patentability search, here are some criteria you should considered when selecting a database:

Year coverage

Currency - how often is the database updated?

Country coverage

Classification

Patent Office Databases

The largest public patent database on the internet, Espacenet contains 90 million patent documents from more than 90 countries including Canada and the U.S., plus 2 million non-patent literature records.